There’s just no stopping the sharing. Despite recent legal challenges to certain “peer to peer” car-sharing services, the range of sharing options keeps on expanding, making it easier and easier for consumers to skip taxis, traditional car rentals — and car ownership in general. Last week was quite the roller-coaster ride for peer-to-peer car-sharing service RelayRides. First, the company, which arranges for drivers to borrow cars owned by other members for $5 to $20 per hour, announced it had purchased a car-sharing competitor called Wheelz. The move not only expands the reach of RelayRides, it also opens up the possibility of incorporating the Wheelz technology known as DriveBox, which allows cars to be rented and driven away via app — no swapping of car keys required. As the company eliminates hassles and attracts more renters and car owners to participate, the potential for the business model soars, as explained in Fortune: “Our vision isn’t to stop at the car-rental market,” says RelayRides CEO Andre Haddad. “It’s really to help disrupt the concept of car ownership by enabling people to rent cars whenever they need them and access [cars] on a need-basis rather than having to buy one.” The company’s lofty goal is to be able to offer a RelayRides car within a 10-minute walk of 100 million Americans by the end of 2015. That goal may be slightly harder to achieve thanks to the second bit of big RelayRides news that took place last week. As Haddad related in a blog post, RelayRides suspended all operations in New York State as of Thursday because the Department of Financial Services “believes there is noncompliance with certain unique aspects of NY insurance law.” (MORE: Peak Traffic-Ticket Season Is Here: Police Pushed to Give More Seat-Belt Citations) The Wall Street Journal reported last week that SideCar, a ride-sharing app, likewise was forced to suspend its service in New York City after a judge indicated SideCar drivers were essentially operating taxis or car services without a license — which is illegal. Officials in other
Tag Archives: Companies & Industries
How Much Will a Legal Marijuana Habit Cost You?
If you’re an average pot smoker in Colorado—paying average prices for average-quality marijuana—you can expect to spend around $650 on weed next year. A study conducted by the Colorado Futures Center at Colorado State University aimed to get to the bottom of how much the state can expect to collect in tax revenues now that marijuana is legal. By doing a little extra math, we can get a rough estimate for what the average marijuana enthusiast will spend annually as well. Researchers estimate that in 2014, 642,772 Colorado residents, or about 12.5% of the state population, will take advantage of pot’s newly legal status. Analysts assumed each person would smoke or otherwise “use” 3.53 ounces of marijuana annually, for a total of 2,268,985 ounces (about 142,000 pounds) per year. All of these numbers may be underestimated, because they’re based on data compiled when recreational marijuana was illegal. In fact, there are so many unknowns in the realm of legal non-medicinal pot that all of this math has a crude back-of-the-napkin quality to it. In any event, using the study’s numbers, the average marijuana enthusiast can expect to pay a retail price of $185 per ounce next year. Multiply that times 3.53 ounces—which no one can buy at once, mind you, because there’s a one-ounce purchase maximum for residents—and the total comes to $653 annually spent on pot. (MORE: This Exists: Medical Marijuana for Pets) How much the individual actually winds up spending on marijuana will depend on several factors, most obviously the quality (and price) of the pot and how much one smokes. Researchers used the crowdsourcing site PriceofWeed.com to get the $185-per-ounce figure. As of early April, an ounce of marijuana was averaging $206 on the black market, and because the price is expected to drop once pot is legal, the study landed on $185. If the smoker is opting for higher-quality, $300-per-ounce marijuana, his annual pot bill would top $1,000. That’s for someone smoking the average of 3.53 ounces per year. A heavy smoker who goes with $300-per-ounce
For JC Penney, the Right Direction May Be … Reverse
JC Penney has its old CEO, Mike Ullman, in charge of the company again. Abundant sales and coupons have returned, as have brands that disappeared for a spell. In many ways, the JC Penney of old is back. Whether this is a good thing for the company remains to be seen. About month ago, within days of Ron Johnson being fired as CEO and Mike Ullman retaking his former position at the helm of JC Penney, Ullman quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying that there were no plans to bring back the old JC Penney. “I wouldn’t recommend that we go back to the way J.C. Penney was when I left,” he said. “Things change.” Still, JC Penney has essentially done a huge about-face in recent weeks, and it’s understandable why: The short-lived Johnson era, with its no-coupons stand and new focus on hip boutique brands, alienated customers and damaged sales badly. For the three-month span ending May 4, JC Penney reportedly lost $289 million, with sales decreasing 16.4% compared to a year ago — which was itself an awful period for the retailer. To bring back customers, JC Penney has been bringing back its traditional, pre-Johnson pricing and discount strategies. This week, jcpenney.com was littered with old-school discounts—for instance, 50% to 60% off patio furniture, and 30% to 40% off clothing with the St. John’s Bay label, the retailer’s exclusive brand that disappeared during the Johnson era and was brought back in March. (MORE: Splurge Surge! Luxury Spending on the Rise) Of course, there are those who view such discounts are straight-up frauds, based on artificially inflated list prices. Johnson himself would be in this camp. In January 2012, Johnson, the retail superstar who had helped turn Target and the Apple Store into huge success stories, promised to get rid of such “fake” prices and summarily slashed original prices by 40% or more. Shoppers weren’t crazy about the newly cheap list prices—because their arrival prompted the end of sales and coupons—and so in recent weeks the retailer has
After The Office, Dunder Mifflin Will Live On in Every Office
It sounds like the plot of an unaired episode of The Office—Staples, the archnemesis of regional paper company Dunder Mifflin, licenses the smaller business’s name and starts selling paper and other office products under its banner. You can easily envision Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute flying to the office supply giant’s headquarters to win their company’s name and honor back. Maybe there’d be a gift basket bribe involved. Thanks to some clever branding, fiction has become reality. Though Jim, Dwight, and the rest of the quirky characters on NBC’s long-running sitcom will have their final cringeworthy moments together tonight in the show’s series finale, Dunder Mifflin’s paper will fill the copy machines and supply closets of real offices around the country for years to come. A Staples subsidiary, Quill.com, has been selling Dunder Mifflin office products for a year and a half, and not just as mementos or gag gifts. It’s become one of the company’s most successful brands, generating millions of dollars in revenue annually. “Paper…is a race to the bottom as paper usage is going down,” says Paul Bessinger, the director of innovation at Quill.com. “We’re looking for different pop culture phenomena and external brands that we can tie to these mundane product categories to differentiate. That’s really how initially pairing copy paper and Dunder Mifflin came about.” (MORE: The Housing Upturn Looks Like the Real Thing) The franchise, which began with paper, has now extended to sticky notes, Sharpie-like markers, and notepads. Bessinger says all the items in the product line follow the guiding philosophy of, “What Would Dunder Mifflin Do?” So the sticky notes are actually multicolored “Diversity Notes,” perfect for overcoming stereotypes. Storage boxes can be adapted to be part of a bean-bag toss game suitable for your next office olympics. And legal pads include checkboxes to note if your officemates are alert, asleep or maybe doing crosswords during a meeting. Most of the Quill.com products are sold in bulk to supply entire offices instead of individual fans. Some of the products are also available
Airline Baggage Fees: On the Rise — Yet More Passengers Deem Them ‘Reasonable’
Even as overall baggage fees have increased, some of the nation’s biggest airlines aren’t collecting as much as they did a couple of years ago. Perhaps even more surprisingly, there’s been a sharp rise in travelers who aren’t bothered by the idea of paying extra for checked luggage. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics just released airline revenue data for 2012, and guess what? We paid more in fees than the year before. The Associated Press and other outlets highlighted how the nation’s 15 largest airlines collected baggage fees totaling $3.5 billion and $2.6 billion worth of ticket change fees, representing increases of 3.8% and 7.3%, respectively, compared to 2011. The numbers probably aren’t surprising to the average traveler. Airline fees have been rising for years, and the idea that baggage fees crept up by merely a few percentage points may even come as somewhat of a relief. A closer look at the BTS’s figures, however, offers some data that is a bit of a surprise. Delta tops the list of baggage fee collectors, with $866 million in 2012. Yet Delta barely increased its baggage fee revenues last year; they reached roughly the same level ($864 million) in 2011. What’s more, the totals of both years are down significantly from 2010, when Delta reaped $952 million in baggage fees alone. (MORE: One Airline That Stubbornly Refuses to Pile on Fees — For Now) So believe it or not, the $866 million in baggage fees collected by Delta probably comes as a disappointment to the airline. Insiders said last summer that Delta had plans to collect an extra $1 billion in passenger fees—all kinds, not just baggage—annually by 2014. Delta isn’t the only major carrier struggling to siphon more baggage fee money from customers. American Airlines has also seen a falloff in baggage fees: $580 million in 2010, $593 million in 2011, and “just” $557 million in 2012. Meanwhile, Spirit Airlines, the country’s most fee-crazed carrier, managed to crank up baggage fee tallies to $168 million last year, more than the double
Peak Traffic Ticket Season Is Here: Police Pushed to Give More Seat Belt Violation Citations
For the two weeks around Memorial Day, there’s more reason than normal to buckle up: Police around the country are stepping up enforcement of seat belt laws and plan on giving out double the usual number of tickets. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is promoting the two-week period from May 20 to June 2 as the National Seat Belt Enforcement Mobilization campaign. The annual “Click It or Ticket” event centers on Memorial Day weekend, and police around the country will be “aggressively” dishing out citations to anyone violating seat belt and child restraint laws. While local and state police departments are stepping up enforcement of the laws 24/7 for all drivers and passengers, there are more likely to be violations by certain groups, and at certain times of day. According to NHTSA data, men ages 18 to 34 are less likely than others to wear seat belts, and nighttime in general is when more drivers and passengers tend to “forget” or just not bother with the fastening of seat belts. Among other places, a comprehensive enforcement effort is planned for Washington state, reports the Seattle Times. From May 20 to June 2, extra patrols from 20 local police departments, as well as county and state police, will be deployed to specifically hand out tickets to drivers on cellphones and anyone in a car not wearing a seat belt. (MORE: Is It Time to Stop Green-Lighting Red-Light Cameras?) Law authorities in New Jersey stated that they are even planning to hand out tickets for adults in the back seat not wearing seat belts. Only 36% of adults do so, compared to 88% of adults in New Jersey in a car’s front row. According to data gathered by Businessweek, during the annual push on seat belt enforcement, states are known to double the number of traffic tickets handed out compared to normal periods. The program is a surefire “moneymaker” for states such as Nebraska: The state, according to Highway Safety Administrator Fred E. Zwonechek, expects to double the number of
A Q&A With the Real-Life Maker of ‘Arrested Development’s’ Bluth’s Frozen Bananas
To coincide with the release of Season 4 of “Arrested Development” on May 26, the Bluth’s Original Frozen Banana Stand is popping up in locations around New York and London. But these frozen bananas aren’t being hand-dipped by George-Michael. They’re made by Chuck Pheterson, the founder and president of Florida-based Totally Bananas, a man who hadn’t watched a single episode of the show when he started the company in 2009 and didn’t even realize his frozen bananas were the frozen bananas being handed out to “Arrested Development” fans this week – until I e-mailed him to set up the following interview. How did you get involved with the Netflix plan to offer frozen bananas at the replica Bluth’s Frozen Banana Stand? We sell through distribution channels, so for the most part, we don’t know where our product ends up. We started sending our product out last week, and another order this week for a total of about 14,000 bananas. We knew it was Netflix, but we didn’t really know what this was all about. Wait. So you didn’t know this was for the Bluth Booth? When I got your e-mail, we looked at it and said, holy moly! That’s when I found out. I thought this was a Netflix party. (WATCH: TIME on the Scene at ‘Arrested Development’s’ Bluth’s Banana Stand) That would be quite the party. We have companies that buy thousands of bananas. So this wasn’t an unusual order for you guys. That’s mostly what we do. We supply all the Niagara Falls concessions on the Canadian side. We have products at CVS, at Shell stations throughout the state of Florida. Major zoos like the Bronx Zoo or the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans order from us. For me, this was just another order that I thought was for a company party. In our e-mail exchange, you said your phone was ringing off the hook. Do you now think it was related to Netflix and you didn’t realize it? Now, yeah. When we found out, we started sending out
McDonald’s McRib Has a Challenger: Burger King Roll Outs Its Own Boneless Rib Sandwich
Burger King has been accused of occasionally copying the competition, what with a less burger-centric menu along the lines of Wendy’s, and a recent emphasis on higher-quality beverages (coffee, smoothie) not unlike McDonald’s. Very soon, reports the industry publication Burger Business, Burger King menus will feature the BK Rib Sandwich, a boneless rib offering slathered in tangy barbecue sauce that may sound very familiar to loyal fans of the McDonald’s McRib. The company is expected to announce later this week that the new rib sandwich will be available during the summer of 2013, along with several other limited-time-only seasonal menu items. According to USA Today, the BK Rib Sandwich sold “extremely well” during a test run at Burger King locations in Louisiana. The new sandwich will debut nationally on May 21 and have a price of around $3.49 a la carte, or $5.59 as a meal with fries and a drink. Considering the fanatical cult following enjoyed by the McRib—not every fast food sandwich has Facebook pages, websites, and a Twitter account dedicated to it—it’s somewhat surprising that there isn’t another high-profile boneless rib sandwich already on the market. The truth is that the McRib wasn’t really a big hit as a regular menu item; instead, the sandwich has achieved much-discussed success over the years partly because it has been so elusive, appearing in select locations at select times of year. For the most part, consumers were lukewarm about the sandwich when it was a menu staple, but their interest has grown hot now that they’re forced to wait for the McRib to appear from time to time — always on a limited-time basis. (MORE: Chuck E. Cheese: Where a Kid Can Gamble Like an Adult) So there’s no guarantee that some other boneless rib sandwich will be a hit with fast food customers. A bit of mystery and intrigue may be required to put sales over the top. (It would probably also help if the thing actually tastes good.) Like the McRib itself—and like so many of the latest